Due to icy conditions at the speaker’s home in the Virginia mountains, we are rescheduling this lecture to Thursday, March 19. We apologize for any inconvenience and hope you can join us in March!
Speaker: Paula Whyman
Paula Whyman, award-winning author of Bad Naturalist: One Woman’s Ecological Education on a Wild Virginia Mountaintop (Timber, 2025), will share about her newest book during her presentation at Wing Haven. Her book is a blend of memoir, natural history, and conservation science, a chronicle of her attempts to restore retired farmland to natural habitat and what she discovered along the way.
Registration includes presentation (in-person only), Q&A session and admission to Wing Haven’s gardens. No virtual options available.
$28/Member
$38/Non-member
$15/Student
Meet the Speaker
Photo credit Doug Sanford
Paula Whyman is an award-winning author. Her first book, the linked short story collection You May See a Stranger, won praise from The New Yorker and a starred review in Publishers Weekly, and won the Towson Prize for Literature. Her stories have appeared in literary journals including McSweeney’s Quarterly, Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, The Hudson Review, and The Southampton Review. Her fiction was selected for the anthology Writes of Passage: Coming-of-Age Stories and Memoirs from The Hudson Review. Her nonfiction has been featured on NPR, and in the Washington Post, The American Scholar, and The Rumpus. She was a Tennessee Williams Scholar in Fiction at the Sewanee Writers Conference.
Whyman has taught in writers-in-schools programs through the Pen/Faulkner Foundation in Washington, DC, and the Hudson Review in Harlem and the Bronx, New York. Her fiction is part of the curriculum at The Young Women’s Leadership School in Harlem. She is co-founder and editor in chief of the literary journal Scoundrel Time, and, earlier, was a book development editor with the American Psychological Association. She has served as a judge for literary competitions and a panelist evaluating applications for artist residencies. Whyman earned her MFA from the American University, where she received the Myra Sklarew Thesis Award.
Whyman’s work has been supported by fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, The Studios of Key West, Oak Spring Garden Foundation, and VCCA, as well as grants from the Maryland State Arts Council. She served two terms as Vice President of the MacDowell Fellows Executive Committee.
She spends her time on a mountain in Virginia with her husband and a mercurial standard poodle.
